Text and images from a Talk by DR P H Lidde

 

Though the title of my talk may be ‘A Lifetime in History’, we ALL have a lifetime in History and we are neglecting something if we were not to be aware of it. Have YOU any record other than vivid memory of your life during Covid times for example, your stance over Brexit, the financial crash, serious flooding, winters of deep snow. Do you keep a diary? Have you written up your early memories before they are gone? I am not seeking to inflate their significance but am simply wanting to remind you that if you were not to have done, then when you are gone, then those memories are gone, except perhaps in other people’s memories of you, and when they are gone, you have really disappeared.

Now there’s a cheerful little introduction!

None of what might be thought the conventional starting points for my commitment to history is applicable – not from my parents, schooling, university, Teacher Training College, though I do remember one inspiring lecturer on a British Summer School of Archaeology course, Raleigh Radford, who put his fingertips together, actually seemed to shut his eyes, looking up to Heaven, perhaps for inspiration, and, without notes, spoke brilliantly about castles or prehistoric monuments.

What began TO SET FIRE to my OWN fascination with history was my attempt to introduce schoolchildren and later students preparing for teaching, to famous personalities, places, hill forts, castles; in costume besieged in a castle in the Scottish Borders, living the Cistercian monk’s day at Fountain’s Abbey, reading facsimile documents about factory conditions, and all of us together finding interest and excitement in our Past.

The earliest push towards what was to become work for a lifetime was preparing in 1964 a school exhibition in Liverpool – sixty years ago!, 

– to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War and encouraging veterans to visit and talk to the children about their experience.

Meeting those veterans and retaining a relationship with them were to prove seminal and if it were at this stage, a burgeoning idea; it was to become a passion.
The older ones among you with urban backgrounds will remember the late sixties and early seventies: closures of industrial enterprises, old schools and commercial buildings, the emptying of decayed terraced streets, their demolition and replacement by concrete tower blocks. I remember it vividly and it reinforced my alarm at what we were losing: BUILDINGS by Council decision, seemingly oblivious to the loss of still potentially useful and sometimes significant architectural heritage, and of course the loss of MEMORIES, by death. With my college students in Sunderland in a form of rescue team, we made a determined effort to save what we could.

This was my first experience of leading collaborative work and I loved it: the tape-recording of elderly people, even a survivor recalling the terrible 1883 crowd-crushing Victoria Hall disaster in Sunderland with 183 child deaths; Boer War, Great War service, yes, even in sailing ships. By photography and occasionally fortunate discovery, vestiges of the coal-mining and shipyard industries were tackled: an 18th century ropeworks closing, documents jettisoned. Was I aware then that it may well have made ropes in use at Trafalgar? It did make them for the pioneer railways, Stockton and Darlington, Liverpool and Manchester, ropes and steel hawsers for collieries and cables for ships, perhaps warships at the Battle of Jutland.

Collieries were closing, here Wearmouth,Sunderland, with still a few years to go, but in 1835 when opened, the deepest in the world, and now mining from Wearmouth far out to sea.

I witnessed some of the last ship launches after more than 600 years of shipbuilding; the rust from the rattling chains holding her from hitting the far bank of the river, rising like a cloud as the vessel slid down the ways.

 

 

 

Then the final days in a foundry

 

1870’s Board Schools closing before demolition after a hundred years of elementary education,, on one occasion, its logbook sadly awaiting the bulldozer.

I remember one logbook documenting the children assembled in the yard to watch General Booth of the Salvation Army passing, and another recording the death of pupils from the influenza pandemic in 1919. I saw whole streets under demolition, the smell of damp decay depressingly matching the sight.

We visited collieries in their last days before closure, taken underground to see the workings, the pit ponies at their tasks, their wiry hair and distinctive, not disagreeable, smell.

We were allowed at one colliery to pick up for rescue in the yard pony harness and other detritus to be burned and I was directed to long-retired miners  to record their memories of working practice, Union activity, the bitterness of strikes, Black-leg strike-breaking.

We were shown a newly discovered and retrieved 19th century wooden coal-hauling sledge, all such artefacts taken to the new Beamish Museum or to Sunderland Museum.

Here, we are thanked by what WOULD become Beamish for the deposit of Infant School equipment.

I scarcely need to remind you of the late Frank Atkinson’s vision of an open air industrial museum at Beamish near Chester le Street, triumphantly realised.

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The thrill of those days with small achievements lives with me still and I must mention a special rescue act when a student working on her dissertation on Edith Cavell discovered a lady living on the South coast who in 1914 had nursed with her in Belgium. The student got to the veteran nurse and recorded her.
Student support was transient but with my focus drawn increasingly to the Great War, by Press appeal a volunteer team helped track down potential candidates for interview from Who’s Who, the British Medical Directory linking me to former Regimental Medical Officers, and other sources like the Directory of Anglican clergymen, Crockfords. Crockfords did not just uncover many Regimental Padres but German veterans who as Lutheran clergymen in the Thirties had been found Livings in England by the work of the Bishop of Chichester enabling them to escape from Nazi Germany.

This narrower focus was becoming a consuming drive to capture before death took them the memories of those who had lived through the years of the Great War. How significant it seems to me that I clearly recall, now in 2024 with the ongoing battle of Woke reinterpretation of history, what I regularly picked up from those veterans, their resentment at the 1960’s/70’s presentation of their war as futile, markedly different from the way they had viewed it at the time and continued to view it.

In its early days and until the move to the University of Leeds, the developing archive was housed in a 19th century building in Sunderland originally a hospital which took the very first cases of the cholera epidemic which arrived in Britain in 1831.

A major boost to the collection resulted from a letter I had published in the Daily Telegraph in 1970 inviting veterans to contact me with the aim of documenting their experience. A huge correspondence ensued, perhaps as many as 700 letters and parcels of diaries, photographs, memoirs and offers of help by recollections if I were able to visit them.
My travelling began to almost every corner of the United Kingdom, and later four times to France, Turkey, Australia and New Zealand. Veterans came to Sunderland Polytechnic to see the developing archive and be recorded. Every week we received them, our appreciation never diminishing.

There’s a nice juxtaposition here, a 90 year old volunteer at the top of the photograph, and near the camera, two Great War veterans, one a 1914 Corporal and one becoming a General in the Second War.
Two of the men here are presenting souvenirs from their service at Gallipoli, a Turkish scale-pan marked with a battle location, and a Bell for sounding the Watch for the soldier sailors of the Royal Naval Division.

The tall man, Edward Cooper, in this photograph, won a Victoria Cross in the Ypres Salient in 1917

and this man, a machine gunner, was wounded at Gallipoli.

Happily, a good number came to the first conference I organised on the war  and led the singing of Mademoiselle from Armentieres. at the closing dinner.

 

Here, in New Zealand,is a group to be recorded

and here, a man in Tasmania whom I remember in particular because his end of war government land allotment was surrounded by uncleared bushland and he tried unsuccessfully at dusk to spotlight a wombat for me.

 

This document brings back to me an embarrassing occasion when as a speaker at a veteran lunch in France I performed indifferently with poor French and a hoarse voice.

In due course, and with particular attention to the SECOND World War, the travelling would extend to the United States, Canada and Germany with something like four thousand interviews undertaken for the two wars.

I had to learn office practice on the hoof, developing my own vision of archive procedure. Of course, the work would have benefitted had I been properly trained but there was no time to spare, the grim harvester of the elderly was scything the field.
I have just this year been reading a biography of a man who began such rescue work far earlier than my attempt. This was Edward Curtis( below)

who photographed and recorded from about 1898 over the next forty years the disappearing culture of all the tribes of North America’s Indians.

How I admire what he accomplished. Desperate for funds, despite encouragement from President Theodore Roosevelt and aid in publication by the philanthropy of JP Morgan, the achievement of Curtis was phenomenal. I can identify with what drove him on to assault and surmount his problems, some problems the same as were to face me, most notably in Curtis’s case the hostility of the Smithsonian Institution, but above all I shared his conviction that the work simply had to be done.

The commitment was unavoidable.

In addition to frequent day trips to record, I became accustomed regularly to doing five day distance travelling research trips to work with elderly people. I might have miles to drive each day, four taping appointments to fulfil, the thank you letters to write before the day was done as well as being aware of newly arrived post at my now distant base and at the end of the trip six issues of the Telegraph Obituary columns to search for more families to be respectfully contacted lest 1914-18 material were binned. I came home of course exhausted but elated too, the boot of my car filled with tapes, diaries, original letters, photo albums and sometimes uniforms.

I bear scars from my obsession with this rescue act, some from academic opponents on the grounds that the work was only ‘regimental badge and medal collecting’, or, more venomously, that it was ‘personal empire building‘, and some, no doubt, by errors of my own making, turning up on the wrong day to record an air marshal, putting up an Armistice display in the university without awareness that the autumn leaves at the bottom held dampness potentially damaging to the documents in the display case. My knuckles were duly rapped.

 

Finding an institutional base  for a collection which over a period of eighteen years documented more than four and a half thousand people, was obviously essential. I can tell that story in two or three sentences but in fact it took three years. The Imperial War Museum, Manchester University, Cambridge and other universities became possibilities but my having a post to continue its development was one problem, others were existing space and funding. The answer was found at the University of Leeds in 1988 with the establishment of the Liddle Collection of First World War archival materials. In this respect my debt to the sustained initiative of Professor David Dilks of the School of History at Leeds can never be repaid. I had been blessed by the support of a superb team of volunteers in Sunderland and we must all have had mixed feelings as huge lorries were packed for the transfer of the archive.

At Leeds, just as good a team of volunteers was built and with the media coverage some remarkable additions were made, none more personally significant than a pair of hand-made mandolins with the badge and lettered insignia of the 16th Battalion, (Church Lads Brigade,) the King’s Royal Rifles, the unit in which my father had served.

My father had died when I was just four and I had little memory of him but he must have listened to and sung with his fellow riflemen to tunes from these mandolins and it was quite thrilling to have this awareness.

Such artefacts, and in particular from the Dardanelles campaign, were to be exhibited in London, Glasgow, Leeds and elsewhere.
In Leeds in 1994, a month of Great War commemorative events was held with a parade and concert by the band of the Welsh Guards, exhibitions

 

 

a conference and staged re-enactment events throughout the city – the arrest of a Conscientious Objector, stretcher-borne wounded carried from the central station to the nearby Leeds General Infirmary, and here, troops leaving by train for the Front.

Helpful to researchers who came to work in the Collection was a Cross Reference system devised to record opinions, attitudes and topics which enabled judgement based on original evidence of what people had written at the time. For example, on their German foes, French peasants and soldiers, workers on strike, High Command, particular battles, the war itself, experience of different fronts, specific units.

From the Home Front, working in munitions and other factories, on the railways, in shipyards, coalmines, on the land, fund-raising, running a household, nursing at home and abroad, and then childhood life.
Retrieval of this speeded up research though for long all the cross-referencing was by laborious manuscript, later typed up, and then retyped at regular intervals. Digitisation was yet to come.

 

The cross-referencing facilitated my own writing on what could be learned from original and recalled evidence of experience of the war

I was trying to reveal what the Collection’s resources told us by description and reaction, what those years meant for individuals and where the balance lay for more general judgement.

A journal, The Poppy and the Owl and an association of Friends of the Collection were founded, just as later was to be the case with work on the Second World War.

Working with other historians I found especially rewarding, learning from their research. A good example of this was from Americans on the hostility to be overcome in drawing the States into involvement with Britain’s battle for survival in both World Wars.
Related to my theme of a lifetime’s involvement in history and then work with fellow historians, I can share with you the irony that collaboration with German historians was invariably easy and satisfactory, that with French, the reverse. I like to think that the soul of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig might nod in sympathy with the latter case.

Of some of the extraordinary documents donated and some of the exceptional men and women I was fortunate to interview, I have still clear memories – a diary of the 1914 Christmas Truce, one by a Regimental Medical Officer recording being wounded HIMSELF in No Man’s Land on the first day of the Somme, one for Armistice Day shown here

You may be surprised at this diarist:

‘unless Germany plays any monkey tricks the war is ended. Thank God’. The men all took the news very calmly and very little excitement just a feeling of great relief and Thank God. I wish we could have kept on for just a few weeks longer. They say that the Huns feared a revolution in Germany. I wish there had been one. I hope we shall be absolute Prussians in our peace terms’.

There are many examples of fascinating material from those captured by the Germans and the Turks, and impressive artwork. It is a reasonable presumption that this artist experienced both the scenes depicted here for 1915, a flooded trench and hospitalisation.

Of course I remember clearly some of the men I recorded who were to be awarded the Victoria Cross, and some of the conscientious objectors who faced the ordeal of a death sentence for the consequences of their standpoint and, touchingly too, the diary entry immediately after Jutland by a girl in a Kirkwall photography shop wondering how many men would NOT now be coming in to collect their developed photographs.

For the Second World War, a girl’s list of all she will need from her home on the South coast in the imminent emergency of German invasion and her ordered evacuation; recordings and the logbooks of men crewing Lancaster and Halifax bombers, piloting gliders or parachuting on D-Day; listening to the terrible memories of Auschwitz survivors. Among the most moving testimonies were those of servicemen learning of being left for another by wives at home, confessions of failure of morale and concerning issues of homosexuality. I cannot readily think of any artefact given to me to match this,

the long bow made to order by an RAF Fitter in the likelihood of invasion in 1940 and the shortage of firearms. Mind you, did you know, as I did not until recently, of a British Officer, Jack Churchill, who actually used a Longbow from 1940 with the Manchester Regiment in France and later in Commando Operations.?

How I became involved in Second World War documentation rescue is simple in explanation, not so in realisation. Not infrequently Great War interviewees offered me recall of their later experience and materials relating to it. Then, out of the blue, came an invitation from the secretary of the Battle of Britain fighter pilots’ association to record their surviving members; then an opportunity following my interviewing the Second Earl Haig and Lord Harewood to contact Colditz veterans with whom they had shared incarceration. This was followed by an invitation from the Duke of Edinburgh to record memories of his naval service.

Carrying out these undertakings failed to convince the then authorities at Leeds University Library that formal sanction of 1939-45 work should be given on grounds of academic opportunity and obligation. There was something of a battle which I lost but from both outside and inside the university came help.

As a Charitable Trust, a team led by Businessman Graham Stow with Lawyer Rhydian Jones, Accountant Roger Henton, Soldier/Historian Major General Henry Woods and Historian Hugh Cecil, worked to give birth to the Second World War Experience Centre in Leeds and for ten further years I was its Director. In time of great need, the Centre was to be sustained almost miraculously by the benevolence of Rob Fleming who became and is the Chairman of Trustees.

In 1999, specifically targeted rescue work on 1939-45 was launched from the Centre and this archive flourishes today in Otley with more than ten thousand individuals documented and digitised – British, Dominion, American, French, Polish, Czech, Belgian, German, Italian.
In daily life, by chance, choice or invitation, my lifetime in history has brought me special experiences – seeing the First World War German battleship, Goeben, just before she was broken up, the ship which brought Turkey into the war and led to the Gallipoli campaign; actually boarding and inspecting the  only Great War Dreadnought battleship still in existence, USS Texas    still active in the second war, bombarding enemy emplacements in Normandy and then in the Pacific; reading the names in an American Normandy Second World War cemetery, Welsh, Irish, English, Scottish, Jewish, Spanish, Arabic, African, French, German, Italian, Slavic and more, understanding better America’s achievement, and America’s problems; 

 

 and then, most unexpected, being invited to recharge the Eternal Flame at the Arc de Triomphe by French veterans of the Dardanelles Campaign.

Before I conclude with a remark on what history continues to mean to me and how its rewards are within everyone’s reach, I would like respectfully to offer a piece of advice in thinking about the Past and an answer to the question which might be in the minds of some of you listening to my burbling on: how often have I been wrong in my public judgements and have had the grace to admit it?

THE ADVICE: Yes, ‘the Past IS a foreign country: they do things differently there’, in that famous phrase. You cannot approach understanding it unless you make yourself familiar with the DIFFERENT values, attitudes, opinions, living conditions, general work experience and expectations of those times, whenever those times were and whatever those sentiments were.

An historian for whom I have great respect, the late Richard Holmes, in his biography of the Duke of Marlborough, wrote so sensibly that WHAT IS HISTORY TO US was an UNKNOWN and challenging FUTURE to John Churchill, the later Duke. Holmes wrote that ‘even to begin to grasp him we must break free from what some historians call ‘presentism’, the INABILITY to see anything save through the eyes of the present moment’.
To judge the Past through the opinion lens of today is akin to blaming a horse for not being a better-looking cow, or to declaim: ‘why on earth did they not use their mobile phones in the First World War when the telephone lines were blown up’.
By all means conclude that our ways are better now and, together with our national achievements of the Past, recognise that, by WHAT WAS KNOWN AND ACCEPTED AT THE TIME, this or that was wrong or misguided, but also be aware that in YOUR claim of moral and intellectual superiority over how things were done in the Past, YOUR judgements may well be damned by future generations who, relatedly, find YOUR conclusions no longer acceptable.

THE CONFESSION: do I feel that in my earlier judgements I was wrong about this or that? With regard to any certainties I expressed, yes, probably. Historians are sometimes guilty of making their reputations by advancing new interpretations selecting their evidence by inclusion or exclusion. I don’t feel I have been guilty of that, but I will have failed to give due attention that there is ALWAYS ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW. Specifically, I have felt that History has short changed Haig and his Senior Command, too cravenly swallowing the idea that it was only through Lloyd George and American intervention that we won the Great War. Hence, my different conviction will have led me to underestimate the scale of the problems facing the British Prime Minister and the psychological and material impact of American entry in 1917.
Winning the war by starving your enemies to exhaustion, learning, through bitter experience, a means of draining their diminishing human and material resources more effectively than they can drain your’s, are not comfortable concepts to digest and there ARE OTHER WAYS of looking at things – the terrible human and material cost over so many months of endurance. Had the war been waged effectively? Indeed, should we have been engaged in it at all? Have I grasped fairly the almost immeasurable scale of the Prime Minister’s remit? I still grapple with some of these issues.

I may have been guilty on occasion of a tendency to see History being MADE by ‘Goodies and Baddies’ and also being WRITTEN by ‘Goodies and Baddies’, instead of the truth lying in a more mixed amalgam of positive and negative factors?
Less important but still regrettable, is my disregard of the poets of Great War disillusionment, not because of an unwillingness to acknowledge their personal anger, nor that they spoke for some, but because the spirit of later changing times has led to their work being put forward by media, teachers and lecturers as representative of the futility of the war, a futility we should all accept, a conclusion which sincerely I feel misjudged.
Sadly, I WILL have interviewed some people when I was inadequately informed to help them do justice to their particular story, or did not listen intuitively to develop their answers, or I displayed inadequate rigour in my questioning.
A disappointment of a different nature – I am regretful that, in retirement, my reading and thinking has made me feel, too late now, better equipped to help students with their history than when I actually taught them.
Can we learn from history? Can humanity’s scourge of war be avoided? Far too big a subject to bring up at the end of a long talk but perhaps the fact that you would all give me different responses if I were to ask you how this might be achieved, indicates that this has proved an intractable subject for mankind.
With regard to the teaching of history, a subject which, when well taught, AND among other benefits too, is surely fundamental to an understanding of the world in which we live, I lament the fact that some Examination Boards, and hence schools, and some universities, do not share this view. I lament too, that where history IS taught, there is such concentrated focus on gender and anti-colonial themes as to imply, dare I suggest impose, that this is the ONLY way forward. However, having lived through times where the story and interpretation of our Past lay solely through the doings of Kings, a few Queens and some military adventurers, and this became largely ditched for ECONOMIC CAUSATION of all developments, I have some hope for evolutionary change in this respect.

To conclude: of course you don’t have to earn your living as an historian to savour the joy of history all around us. Without travelling outside our beloved county we have our prehistoric standing stones, henges, hill forts, Saxon crypts, Viking village names, castles, churches, chapels, stately homes, manor houses, mills, canals, railways, bridges, viaducts, old factories, vestiges of the cottage woollen industry, of coalmining, lead mining, lime kilns.

There are our museums, art galleries, libraries and archives, our old streets, hotels and public houses. For our more recent history there still remain sites of interest as well as the sad but honourable memorials for both World Wars. History all around us.

‘My goodness! Was THIS place really where King Richard the Third, or Guy Fawkes, or Captain Cook, or Blind Jack of Knaresborough, or William Wilberforce, or ‘Gentleman Jack’ Anne Lister, or the Bronte family, or Herbert Asquith, or James Mason, or Harold Wilson, or Freddie Trueman, was actually born, OR lived OR worked OR wrote OR played OR died? I didn’t know that. How extraordinarily interesting!’

Newspapers and TV Channels daily have their references to history and the more you are well informed on the subject covered, the better based will be your enjoyment or your critical questioning. I have not mentioned books and the ‘feel’ of the Past as you sit comfortably arm-chaired, reading, and there are podcasts too, just to suggest that I am not yet entirely fossilised.
On your travel to work, your eye, or mind’s eye if you were driving, can speculate on the banks and ditches in the fields, the date-indicating windows, doors, roofs of the buildings you pass. So much to stimulate the mind. Yes, we all have our worries with which we battle but, otherwise, why settle for an empty mind when there is so much there, free, all around, to enrich us?

History lies in our reach, including that of our own family. It is all around us, just waiting for us to pick up and relish, nourishing the spirit. I have been so lucky in my addiction and it is there for us all but it needs MORE than our interest, it needs OUR CONSTANT CONCERN TO WATCH OVER IT TOO.

PHL September, 2024

Regarding Copyright – Peter Liddle would like gratefully  to acknowledge the following known copyright holders for images used to illustrate this lecture:

Sunderland Antiquarian Society, Sunderland Echo, University of Leeds, Liddle Collection, The Yorkshire Post,The USS Texas. AP Photo/David J. Phillip, Calvados Tourism, English Heritage,The National Portrait Gallery, USA,Young Archeologists Club, Beamish Transport Online, Maison Parfaite, Craven and Valley Life, Phileas Guides, ICOM UK.

A large number of the photographs used here are his own.

Peter Liddle apologises for any inadvertent omissions.  No copyright infringement is intended. he does not own, nor claim to own the rights to those illustrations used here that he does not own.